Then there was silence.
Cautiously, Coyote limped forward, probing the darkness with the muzzle of the rifle. Ten feet away he found a North Korean soldier, sprawled on his back with a line of bloody holes stitched from left hip to right shoulder. He was very dead.
Not much farther down the slope he found two more bodies, another dead Korean and Kohl, both torn by rounds from the first Korean's AK. Coyote guessed that Kohl had wounded one KorCom with the hush puppy, and that the second man had killed them both with his indiscriminate hosing of the underbrush. Both Koreans, he decided, had been fleeing the massacre in the Nyongch'on camp.
He went back to Kohl and sat down heavily. His leg, he noticed, was no longer hurting as badly. Adrenaline ― or shock ― had numbed it once again.
Coyote found himself thinking back to a small eternity ago riding the heavy swell of the Sea of Japan, holding Mardi Gras's body in his arms. Once again, death had brushed close. He'd not known those three sailors murdered in the camp, but he'd been talking with Kohl, joking with him only moments ago.
He felt contaminated, as though Death itself had marked him. The people he got close to tended to die suddenly. There seemed to be no point in going on.
Captain Sun Dae-Jung ducked down inside the hatch of his ZSU and took the headset from the vehicle's gunner. He held it to his ear. "Cho Sun imnida!" He had to shout to be heard over the roar of the engine. "This is Sun!"
"This is Major Nung, Wonsan Defense Force. What is your position, Captain?"
Sun did a fast estimate. "Sector four-seven! Anbyon Road, three miles south of the coast highway! Coming up on Nyongch'on!"
"Excellent, Captain. I want you to deploy along the ridge, immediately."
Sun felt excitement thrill within. "Is it another air raid, Major?"
"We have reports of enemy helicopters in your area."
Helicopters! Those slow, thin-skinned aircraft would be no match at all for the quad 23s of his command.
"We believe the enemy has been homing on our radar emissions, Captain," the major continued. "Use your radar sparingly."
"Understood, Comrade Major." Sun had interviewed Libyan officers who had lived through the American attacks on their country in 1986. He knew what HARMs could do. "We are deploying now."
"The Fatherland is counting on you, Captain. Our intelligence believes the object of the Yankee raid may be the release of American criminals being held at Nyongch'on-kiji. If so, those helicopters could be headed for your position."
"And we will be ready!"
The lumbering tracked ZSUs spread out along the roadside, maintaining the approved two-hundred-meter interval between each vehicle. Minutes later, Sun ordered the turret-mounted B-76 radar to be switched on for a quick scan toward the north.
ZSUs carried a four-man crew: commander, radar operator, gunner, and driver. The driver was sealed into his own compartment in the chassis, but the other three occupied the fairly roomy turret. "Four targets, Comrade Captain!" the radar operator reported. "Bearing zero-three-five, range twelve thousand!"
It took only a moment more to confirm that the targets were approaching, flying at low altitude and low speed. With a smile, Sun ordered the radar switched off.
His prey was only minutes away now.
CHAPTER 25
Coyote wasn't certain how long he'd been lying on the hillside above Nyongch'on, but it was the sound of heavy equipment, like tractors, which stirred him. The illumination from the fires in the North Korean base was fading; he could see lights in the direction of the road which passed Nyongch'on through the saddle in the ridge off to the west, on the far side of the base, but he could not make out what they were.
Overcoming the emotional paralysis which gripped him, he made his way back to Kohl's body. The SEAL's night-vision goggles were smashed ― one round had struck them squarely between the twin optic tubes and gone on to smash his skull ― but the heavy rifle scope was still in its case, slung from his black web gear. He extracted the M938 starlight scope, found the switch to turn it on, and held it to his eye.
He recognized the squat, boxy shape of the ZSU at once: the broad turret which covered most of the full-tracked chassis; the outsized radar mount behind the commander's hatch; the four 23-mm rapid-fire cannons angled skyward. Those guns each fired at a rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, faster than most machine guns; in combat, the quad mount could spew out sixty explosive rounds every second, which made it rapid-fire death for anything slower than a supersonic interceptor. The fire control radar could pick up bogies twelve miles out, could lock on and track at a range of five miles, could knock thin-skinned targets out of the sky from almost two miles away.
And this monster was squatting just outside the gate to the camp, less than five hundred yards from Nyongch'on's airstrip, engine idling. Through the starlight scope's optics he could make out the commander, peering through binoculars toward the northeast.
Coyote scanned along the road with the sight. There was a second ZSU parked two hundred yards behind the first… a third two hundred yards beyond that. Other vehicles were hidden by a bend in the road and steep-sloped terrain, but it was fair to assume there were at least four of the deadly antiaircraft vehicles, perhaps more.
And Cavalry One's helicopters could not be more than a few minutes away.
Galvanized by the realization that the helos were flying into a trap, Coyote scrambled for the pack on Kohl's body. The radio unit was the latest in electronic communications technology, a twenty-kilo man-portable base station which could serve at a TAC COM set in the field, or establish long-range communications through the folding dish and a geosynchronous communications satellite.
The problem was who to call. He knew he could reach the SEALs in Nyongch'on, but there was little they could do at the moment. They'd have their hands full with Chimera's crew and North Korean survivors without having to take on KorCom armor as well. The satellite dish would give him a direct line to the Jefferson at her station somewhere over the horizon, but Coyote didn't know how to acquire the satellite ― an invisible point somewhere in the southern sky ― and he didn't know the codes which would let him get a message through. Without the proper electronic passwords, the computers which switched and operated the system would assume he was enemy jamming and block him out. He didn't know the channel being used by Cavalry One… and had no way of making them believe anything he had to say. The SEALs in the camp would know the right codes, would even know how to reach Cavalry One, but there wasn't time to get their help. Already Coyote thought he could hear the faint throb of helicopters in the distance; if that was Cavalry One, the Marine reinforcements had only minutes now, possibly seconds.
But there would be tactical air cover up, possibly from Coyote's own squadron. He knew the radio frequencies they'd be on… and chances were they'd be in line of sight and therefore within range of his UHF transmitter. At the very least, his signal might be picked up by a Hawkeye circling somewhere out at sea and patched through to where it would do some good.
By the faint illumination of the fires dying in the camp, Coyote switched on the radio and began checking channels. He wasn't sure where the set's tuning range would overlap that used by the aircraft. He heard nothing on the first channel he tried or the second. Combat frequencies were changed frequently as a matter of course to avoid enemy jamming or eavesdropping.
He decided to try the SAR frequency. "Mayday! Mayday! This is Bushmaster with urgent message for anyone on this frequency! Please respond! Mayday, mayday, this is Bushmaster! Any station, come in, please! This is an emergency!"